Page 108 of Lord of Fire and Ice

She was delivering his fourth horn of sweet oblivion when the flashes of a vision came. Katla’s knees gave way, and she sank to the flagstone floor of her chamber on Tysnes.

Fire scorched through her mind. Ships aflame. Men leaping into the sea, their clothing alight with blazing tongues. Smoke obscured her sight.

A blazing orange tunnel encompassed her, held at bay by a pair of outstretched hands.

Brandr’s hands.

As he passed through the conflagration, Katla cowered on the cold flagstones, seared by the heat in his Sending. The acrid scent of burning wood, flesh, and pitch made her belly heave.

A man whose beard and hair were aflame hurled himself toward her, and she was plunged into the frigid water of the fjord. The link between her and Brandr was sliced in two as completely as if someone had taken an axe to it.

Shaken and gasping, Katla came to herself in her bedchamber, spilled mead soaking her hem and filling in the cracks between the flagstones.

Old Gerte’s grandmother had been linked with her grandfather by the chains of inn matki munr while he drowned. If Brandr was underwater, he must have been unaware of it, for she received nothing more from him.

She wept in silence. She couldn’t keen and wail. She was too empty to do anything but let her soul seep from her eyes.

***

Brandr tumbled into the sea, tangled up with Bloodaxe, each of them grappling for the other’s throat. Water doused the man’s flaming head, but Brandr saw Bloodaxe’s lips were gone, his flesh pulled back to reveal his teeth clenched in a death’s-head grin.

Bloodaxe was a dead man, but he wasn’t satisfied to travel to Hel’s cold hall without the man who’d sent him there in tow. A thumb pressed against Brandr’s throat. He wrapped his arms around Bloodaxe and squeezed for all he was worth. Dark spots bloomed before his eyes, but Brandr held on. Finally, Bloodaxe released his last pent-up breath in an explosion of bubbles.

Brandr brought his feet up and kicked himself away from his drowning enemy. Bloodaxe struggled feebly for another few heartbeats and then floated away in the relaxation of death.

A single bubble of air escaped Brandr’s nostril and tickled his cheek. Overhead, the surface of the water blazed with his Greek fire. Beneath him, the broken back of Arn’s dragonship sank into the blue depths. Lungs burning for a breath, he kicked toward the surface.

Even a fire mage couldn’t put out the Greek fire till it had exhausted all its fuel, but he could move it if he could summon the concentration. He splayed his fingers toward the roof of flame and willed it to part above him.

A small oval of open water appeared and then shrank back. Brandr continued to kick toward the surface, trying to marshal his remaining power. Death by fire or death by drowning was still death. If he couldn’t open and maintain a space in the oily surface, he was going to die either way.

Chapter 37

Katla sat by Ulf Skallagrimsson’s bedside through the dark watches of the night as his life wheezed out of him. He’d drunk enough mead to send him into a stupor so deep he should have been insensible, but Ulf balanced on the cusp between life and death, fighting for each breath.

“Be at peace,” she told him. If he must suffer a straw death, she wished it would at least be an easy one.

“No, I must wait for Brandr,” he said, his voice a wisp of sound.

Katla turned her face away. She couldn’t let his father see her hopelessness.

“He’s coming, girl. I feel it.”

Katla wished she did. She hadn’t felt anything since that horrific vision. It was as if her heart had gone numb. Like a limb that had gone to sleep, the muscle in her chest felt like a heavy void, taking up space inside her but only as dead weight.

Someone was shouting in the distance, and Katla gave herself a small shake.

“I’ll be right back,” she said to Ulf.

“Hurry.”

She pushed into the main long hall and found all her people stirring. The double doors at the far end of the longhouse swung open and let in the dawn. And her brother.

“Brandr Ulfson,” Finn shouted, slightly winded from sprinting up the hill from the wharf. “He’s returned. Malvar Bloodaxe is dead, and his forces routed!”

Katla’s chest was full of prickles, as if the blood only then began rushing back into her numb heart. She ran down the center of the long hall and out into the pearly light. Brandr and his friends were making their way up the winding path. She drank in the sight of his golden head.

Her people spilled out of the longhouse behind her. Finn was shouting out details of the sea battle and the way Bloodaxe’s force had dissolved before Brandr’s unconventional use of a southern weapon that incinerated the lot of them.